The Council Has Spoken!! This Weeks Watchers Council Results

The Council has spoken, the votes have been cast, and the results are in for this week’s Watcher’s Council match up.

What is peace between nations? What does it consist of and how does it happen? This week’s winner, Joshuapundit’s What Does Peace Mean Anyway? decided to examine that very timely question, with a glance at how it applies to the Middle East. Here’s a slice:

Peace is said to be a high priority, no matter whom you talk to.People crave it and pray for it, and rightly so.

This is a much more important issue, I think, than most of us realize, especially in these days when people use terms like ‘The Long War’ and ‘the peace process’ .Yet few of us, especially in the West actually stop to think of what we really mean by peace, and what you can’t define clearly is frequently illusory.

The Bible provides one definition, with the prophet Isaiah talking of a time of peace so profound that men will not only transform the arms of battle into implements of peace but cease to study the arts and strategy of war.

That’s obviously an unrealized ideal in the immediate future.

Islam is much more direct about the matter. Westerners are confused when Muslims say that Islam means peace (actually, it comes from the Arabic aslama, which means submission). To Muslims, who divide the world into dar Islam, the part of the world where Islam rules and the non-Muslim world, referred to as dar harb ( literally the house of war), peace is much simpler. It’s a condition where the entire world is dar Islam, exactly what Mohammed ordered his followers to strive for right before his death in 632 CE, according to the Hadiths.

If some Muslims talk of peace when they actually mean a time of dar Islam, it’s understandable that something gets lost in translation – sometimes deliberately so.

So, is peace then simply an absence of war and conflict? It ain’t necessarily so.

In his piece, Robert Stacy McCain writes an account about he and his family being harassed by a convicted domestic terrorist named Brett Kimberlin who just happens to have a wealthy and well connected family after McCain wrote an article about his depredations. We here at the Council chose to make this week’s contest part of a blogburst going on around the ‘sphere at a great many sites. A number of the Council members have written individual stories about what’s going on or are linking to other stories about what’s going on – to show Stacy he’s by no means alone and we stand with him. You should do the same.

Yeah, we got your six, Mr M. Stand your ground, in every sense of the word.

Here are this week’s full results. New Zeal and The Mellow Jihadi were unable to vote this week; neither was affected by the 2/3 vote penalty: